- 5 years ago
25 November 2021
The much-anticipated release of the House of Representatives report, ‘The New Frontier: Delivering better health for all Australians’, is like Christmas coming early for both industry and patients.
Its 31 recommendations are like presents that hold the key to a future where Australians gain fast and equitable access to the most exciting new and potentially curative therapies.
For patients, clinicians and industry alike, the report is the answer to all their Christmas dreams come true, also offering to usher in a new age of collaboration and cooperation where Government works with stakeholders to ensure patients gain fast and equitable access to the exciting new therapies on offer.
The burning question is, will anyone ever get to open these presents and, if they do, how many?
The 31 recommendations are comprehensive and tackle almost every issue brought before the committee, but with a particular focus on fast and equitable access to new therapies.
Missing, of course, is how to pay for this reform agenda. Only recommendations 14 and 31 suggest an increase in industry fees to fund the additional staffing and infrastructure needed to support the changes. For everything else, Government is expected to foot the bill.
But the fact the recommendations tackle all the hoary chestnuts such as resubmission churn, choice of comparators, the path to the LSDP, valuing of vaccines, and MSAC’s lack of accountability, just to name a few, suggests the committee members not only listened to more than 50 hours of evidence and 200 submissions, they believed it.
Perhaps most important is the fact the committee clearly wants to ‘reset’ the way Government and industry work together, many of its recommendations essentially paving the way for a new era of trust and collaboration.
“Throughout its 15-month inquiry, the Committee received over 200 submissions and held 13 days of public hearings in several capital cities,” Inquiry chair Trent Zimmerman said in a release accompanying the report.
“The Committee was moved by the testimony of patients and their families and inspired by the work of our researchers and medical scientists.
“The Committee was impressed by the professionalism of those working in the medicines and technology sectors and appreciative of the obvious dedication, co-operation and knowledge of those within the Health Department who assisted our deliberations in public and private hearings and through their submissions.”
Perhaps one of the most influential witnesses to appear before the committee was the UK’s NICE Deputy CEO Meindert Boysen, given there are several references to the UK in the recommendations.
In giving his evidence remotely, Boysen appeared surprised when asked why NICE trusted industry when it came to establishing prices for new therapies before the health technology assessment was carried out and a price negotiated.
Boysen’s response was, ‘Why wouldn’t you?’
Yet in Australia, Health, in particular, appears to default to a position of mistrust when it comes to industry. Yet after 15 months and one of the most extensive, bipartisan inquiries of recent years, the members of the Parliamentary Standing Committee clearly sided with Boysen, themselves asking, Why not?
“I’ve enjoyed the Inquiry and the bigger picture is to now get whoever is in government to act on our recommendations,” deputy chair Mike Freelander says.
Budget constraints will always impact whether or not recommendations are both accepted and acted upon by Government and, with an election due early next year and the current Health Minister almost certain not to be in the job after the election regardless of who wins, getting these recommendations implemented will be a monumental task.
But industry now has ambassadors on both sides of the House that finally believe it has the best interests of patients at heart and is not just big, bad, greedy pharma. That, in the end, could be the difference between opening just one or two of these presents, and a whole stack of gifts.
©MedNews 2021